I missed the story about the latest school shooting because I don’t follow the news. Please spare me the details, but I know that one must have happened because I suddenly hear people talking about gun control again. It’s funny how Americans have become conditioned to respond to every tragedy by volunteering to give up their rights. Kids OD on drugs, so we sign up for prohibition and sacrifice our privacy in the War on Drugs. We see poor people on our streets, so we write off our right to free speech with anti-panhandling ordinances. By the same Pavlovian conditioning, every time somebody goes berserk with a gun, Americans line up to write the 2nd Amendment out of the Constitution.

Partially because of government propaganda, partially because of media brainwashing, and partially because of denial, many white middle-class liberals still believe that the government works for them, even though, in reality, most of them work for the government. The government, on the other hand, actually works for the rich, who use it to control the rest of us, but they do it in such a way as to convince the middle-class that it was their idea, because, of course, the rich will make the middle-class pay for it.

Middle-class people don’t have many ideas of their own. Instead, they let the rich fill their heads with a few carefully selected memes, endlessly repeated and dutifully conveyed by the media. By the time most people become middle-class, they’ve already sublimated years of conditioning in school, and they’ve learned to do what they are told without thinking about it much. That’s why every stupid middle-class liberal has the same stupid idea at the same time. That’s not thinking; that’s drooling, just like Pavlov’s dogs. The truth is, middle-class people have forgotten how to think for themselves, and instead, have learned to regurgitate whatever predigested pap the rich feed them through the media.

Meanwhile, the rich have created the greatest arsenal of lethal weaponry ever assembled on Planet Earth, and they use it to kill anyone in the vicinity of anyone who might dare stand in their way, with complete impunity. The rich spend a trillion dollars a year, of the middle-class’s money, to upgrade and improve this arsenal every year. The rich now have more bombs, guns, tanks and war-planes at their disposal than the rest of the world combined, and that arsenal is designed, built and maintained at-the-ready, by trained, well-paid professionals, who have learned not to think for themselves, but to do what they are told, because, of course, they make up most of the middle-class.

Stupid white liberals ignore the massive and rapidly growing, pile of bodies murdered by US, state and local governments, which they dutifully serve, lack the courage to oppose, and remain in denial about. Instead, they let the rich use them as ventriloquist dummies to turn these terrible tragedies into political footballs in a sleazy, underhanded attempt to undermine my right, and ability, to defend myself and my home. In so doing, they also distract us from the economic inequity, media manipulation and social dynamics that drives the phenomena of mass violence in our society in the first place.

Last week I hosted a show about the housing crisis on my local community radio station. Like a lot of the country, we have a chronic housing shortage, especially affordable housing, and as a result, thousands of people sleep outside, or in their cars, on these cold, rainy winter nights. After the show, a woman approached me to make a comment. She told me that the people she sees on the street don’t seem very friendly to her. She noticed that the people who carry big backpacks and appear to be living outside, mostly talk to, and associate with, each other. They don’t make much of an effort to engage with the rest of society. She seemed to think that they owe us more of an effort.

I told her that I didn’t think poor people owed her anything. By the time you’ve made someone sleep outside in the rain, put up fences and bars everywhere, and paid cops to roust them from every dry, sheltered place they can find, you’ve pretty much blown your chances for friendship, and you should not be surprised to find them in a bad mood. Everyone seems eager to offer helpful criticism to poor people as to what they could improve about themselves to better deserve our compassion, but I have to ask, and I wish I had asked: What about mainstream society deserves respect? Why should poor people voluntarily participate in a system designed to oppress them? More importantly, why do any of us participate in a system that excludes so many people and denies them even the most basic of their human needs?

Once upon a time, we would say that our society deserved respect because we followed God’s word and we endeavored to obey God’s command, so only God could judge us, but to disrespect our society was to disrespect God himself. A whole lot of people still believe that, by the way. There’s really no point in talking to those people. Rational arguments only go so far with them, and I respect that. Belief is a powerful thing. A shared belief brings stability and cohesiveness to a group, even if those beliefs destabilize the climate, disintegrate the ecosystem, and contradict compelling evidence to the contrary.

These days, the rest of us mostly fancy ourselves rational, intelligent creatures capable understanding the world around us, and of making wise decisions for ourselves and the common good. This is every bit as stupid and crazy as believing in God’s word, but it is also just as important to our identity as Jesus is to Christians’. What’s more, this idea is foundational to the concept of democracy, which has become our new religion.

The News has replaced Mass, and elections have replaced The Holy Communion, but it’s essentially the same mass stupidity. Still, you can talk to these people, because they believe deep in their heart that they can solve any problem with rational thinking and creativity, even if they have no real experience at doing either.

If you believe in the supremacy of human intelligence, and your own ability to think something through, this is one of those things that maybe you ought to take the time to think all the way through: What about our society deserves your respect? And more tangibly: What about our society merits your participation? Think about that for a moment.

Off hand, I can think of a lot of reasons to be ashamed of our society. We should be ashamed of global climate change, and what it means for future generations. We should be ashamed that we have exterminated half of the world’s biodiversity in the last 40 years, and that we squeeze more than a hundred species of plant and animal out of existence and into extinction every day. We should be ashamed that today, having practically exhausted the Earth’s resources, all we have to show for it is a few billionaires, a host of toxic gadgets designed to exploit our every thought, and poverty, poverty everywhere.

Historically, we should be ashamed of genocide. We should be ashamed of slavery. We should be ashamed of internments, witch hunts, lynchings, black lists, prohibitions, Jim Crow etc. We should be ashamed of US foreign policy. That’s just off the top of my head, but it’s already a pretty serious list. I could go on.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I’m just pointing out that we sacrifice a lot, and we excuse an awful lot of really bad behavior, in order to participate in this society. If we could each choose whether or not to participate in modern society based entirely on principle, I’m sure that a lot of people would find our society too distasteful.

Unfortunately, most of us choose to participate in this modern society out of economic pressure, not principle. You work hard and pay taxes, not because of your burning desire to glorify the proud fatherland, but because you are hungry, and because you want to have a roof over your head. We participate in this society largely because of economic coercion, but we tell ourselves that somehow we are in control, and can fix it all with an election, because we are intelligent, rational people capable of understanding the world and making good decisions. That’s the mythology of a democratic society.

In reality, we mindlessly help the likes of Bill Gates, Elan Musk and Donald Trump mine whatever is left of the Earth’s natural abundance to further their plans to re-engineer the world, escape from the consequences of that re-engineering and put their name in gold letters across whatever is left of it, respectively. Not only that, we step over the broken bodies and spirits of our brothers and sisters to do it. Honestly, there’s nothing sane, rational or respectable about any of it. That’s the real crisis today. There is nothing respectable about modern society. It’s a crime, a disaster, and a failure all rolled into one.

Today, we see democracy for the fraud that it is, a thin veneer of populism over a machine built with violence and coercion, for the purpose of violence and coercion. We have plenty to be ashamed of, as a society, and our complete failure to meet the critical challenges of our time, only adds to that legacy of shame.

We no longer believe in God, but now democracy has failed us too. Our gods have died. Only crazy people worship dead gods, but worship them we do, because we have no idea what else to do. What’s more, we still expect the people we sacrificed to these gods to worship them too. And you thought the homeless were mentally ill.

In the time that I’ve written for LoCO, the wholesale price of cannabis has dropped by way more than 50%. Much as I appreciate the price break, the collapse is painful to watch. People are not handling it well, but they don’t need me to remind them that prohibition is an ugly way to make a living or to make fun of them for their excesses. Besides, the free market and legalization will change things around here more than anything I could ever say in an editorial.

I know that this is a hard time for people, and that a lot of people around here will have to find something else to do with their lives. I know how challenging that can be, and I sympathize with my neighbors who are going through that right now. In fact, I’m right there with you. Legalization has cost me my job too.

Much of what I write, here at LoCO, revolves around the excesses and the mythology of the black market cannabis industry. Now that the industry has collapsed in the face of full legalization, the myths quickly fade into legends, as the excesses evaporate and disappear. I’m not here to write folklore about prohibition, although that’s not necessarily a bad idea, but that’s not why you read LoCO.

Legalization has been my issue since 1988, when I wrote the first of many letters to my elected officials about it, and my first Letter to the Editor about it appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal. In 1990 I got my first paid writing gig when the Lincoln Journal Star, in Lincoln NE invited me to write a guest editorial about the economic benefits of hemp as a cash crop for Nebraska’s farmers.

In Boston, I founded and edited Mass Grass, the official newsletter, and a central organizing tool, of Mass Cann, The Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, the lead organization in that state’s legalization movement. In a sense, I’ve had a career working for legalization. It didn’t pay much, but I met some great people, had amazing experiences and smoked a lot of terrific weed. I really loved the work because I believe in it deeply, and felt I had something to contribute.

Now that prohibition is over, at least here in Humboldt County, there’s not much point in advocating for legalization any more, at least not locally. Legalization is just a fact of life now, and for too many people around here, it’s a painful fact of life. You don’t need to hear me say “I told you so,” and I don’t kick people when they’re down. Watching this whole community hit the windshield in slow motion, as the industry slams into a brick wall just makes me cringe. I can’t write about this anymore, at least not for the people who live here. It’s completely unnecessary cruelty.

That doesn’t really leave me much to write about for LoCO. Most of the things I used to complain about have gotten a lot better since the market collapsed. I didn’t hear nearly so much traffic on my road this past year. I heard a lot less heavy equipment, chainsaws and generators this year too. I didn’t get run off the road by any of those 50 cubic yard soil loads this year, but I have seen more litter, especially more soil bags, along our roadways. The smugness is gone too. In its place, I hear a lot of pathetic self-pity that would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and it weren’t my neighbors.

I’m grateful for the relief from the noise, but I would rather clean up roadside trash than write about it, and I’m not ready to immerse myself into the cesspool that is Humboldt County politics enough to write a weekly opinion column about it, so it’s over. Hank isn’t interested in my critiques of media and the internet, and I’m not interested in beating a dead horse, so we’ll call it done. I’ll continue to publish my blog, but you will no longer see it at LoCO and it will no longer remain so Humboldt-centric. It might even get funny again. You never can tell.

I’ll miss the exposure, and I’ll miss the checks, but I’ll never miss prohibition or the War on Drugs. It’s high time for me to do something else with my life, anyway, and that’s probably true for most of us. I’m sure there’s better things ahead for all of us, but we’ll never get there, unless we let go of what’s holding us back. My blog remains one click away, and you can still hear me every Monday morning on KMUD. It’s been fun, LoCO, but bye for now.

They say that American society is becoming more “polarized.” Many blame the media. They say The News doesn’t delve deep enough into the issues, and that media pundits have degraded political rhetoric down to name-calling and wedge issue litmus tests. Of course, both of these things are true, but I think that what’s really happening in American politics runs much deeper than that.

First, I don’t think it makes sense to call it “polarization,” because “polar” implies a pair of equal but opposite extremes. Democrats and Republicans are not opposites. They are remarkably similar, with a few modest, but notable, differences. Democrat and Republican are competing brands of essentially the same product, and neither brand is nearly extreme enough for the American people. In reality, we have dozens of brands of extremism here in the US, that both oppose and attract each other, to varying degrees, and often exchange wing-nuts. Some of them work in coalition with the major parties, and some don’t.

Second, the parties and candidates manufacture their so called “ideals” out of pure hypocrisy and gall, specifically to attract campaign contributions, but also to encourage self-motivated zealots to volunteer for their campaign. How many of the people who answered calls and knocked on doors for Trump in 2016 do you suppose would identify as white supremacists, believe the Earth is flat, or think the universe is only six or seven thousand years old. By the same token, how many black block anarchists, Occupy Movement radicals, and EarthFirster’s got behind Bernie Sanders? The boots on the ground in both parties are just as wacky as rest of America’s lunatic fringe. The only difference is that the wackos in the major parties are managed by professionals, well paid professionals who think they deserve to make even more money than they already do. That’s the real problem in American politics.

The professionals always want more money, because they hate their jobs, and they know that if they had more money, they could make money off of their money, by investing it, and then they wouldn’t have to work. At the same time, the professionals also want investors to make money off of their investments, because the professionals want to live off of their own investments one day, too. That means that investors and professionals, including the ones who run both parties, are constantly looking for new ways to suck more money out of the rest of us.

The more the professionals and the investment class press their game, the more ridiculous the story they have to tell us, to justify the extortion. The more far-fetched and unhinged from reality those stories become, the less difference there is between the major parties and anyone on the lunatic fringe. How stupid do you have to be to believe in trickle-down economics? …or democracy for that matter? Why should it be any harder to believe that the Earth is flat, or that the Moon is made of cream cheese, or that aliens are coming to take us away to a distant galaxy?

Honestly, we’ve all been force-fed a diet of aggressively misleading bullshit since the day we were born, and if you bought into any of it, by now bullshit slingers have built skyscrapers of bullshit on top of it. When it comes down to it, scientists can be just as misleading, and wrong, as religious leaders and politicians, and all they really want is your money. By now, everyone knows this. So, if you really want to believe in something, you might as well believe in something you really want to believe in.

Today, thanks to the fire-hose of bullshit we call the internet, it becomes easier for people to eschew facts and logic just as effectively as both major political parties, all major religions, and most corporations. Why should working people have to face reality when no one else does? Who can blame people for concocting their own mythology and gravitating towards others with similar fantasies?

Americans have become radicalized, not by fundamentalism or religion, but by the non-stop assault on their credulity, and a political system that designed to pull the rug out from under them. American radicalism is a lot more individualistic than the kind of religious fanaticism or populist political movements we’ve seen in the past. Right now American radicalism is a wide open field. Whether it’s a queer antifa motorcycle gang, freegan vagabonds, or militant anti-abortion activists, increasingly, Americans are thinking outside the box, outside the system, and can no longer even agree on basic facts of reality.

This shattered reality will not be remedied by better reporters and more civil debate in the media, nor will it be fixed by a populist politician with a unifying message. The disagreements run too deep. The system has failed, and the lies that we told about it have taken on lives of their own. “Polarization” is definitely not the word to use for what is happening to the American body politic. “Polarization” implies some great mass in the middle, holding it all together. Instead, we should call it the “disintegration” of American politics. What’s more, we should recognize that fact, face it, and figure out where to go from here.

“The goose is dead,” I heard Ed Denson tell the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. He didn’t say “the goose is gonna die if…” He said “the goose is dead.” I’ve heard a lot of that kind of talk lately, but when Ed Denson says “the goose is dead,” I believe him, because he’s the goose’s lawyer. Ed went to the supervisors to complain about the excessive county taxes on legal cannabis, but it appears that the confluence of legalization and regulation created the perfect storm for Humboldt County’s cannabis industry, otherwise known as “the goose that lays golden eggs.”

They could also call it “the goose that eats people, sucks the rivers dry, and turns the community into a ghetto,” but you know how much people around here prefer to focus on the positive. Whatever you call it, Humboldt County’s cannabis heyday is over. The price of black market cannabis collapsed last year in the face of a historic glut in supply. Meanwhile, the CA state regulators dealt the fatal blow to Humboldt’s so called “small farmers” when they decided to license grows larger than one acre. Suddenly, Humboldt County growers are too remote, too dispersed and too small to produce cannabis, competitively in the free market.

The bubble burst. Although it happened suddenly, it didn’t take a genius to see it coming. Anna Hamilton saw it coming a decade ago, and she warned everyone about it. She asked “What’s after pot?” and the community resoundingly replied, “More pot!” Unfortunately, “more pot” quickly turned into “too much pot,” leading to the current collapse in price. It’s a classic small farmer mistake, and it’s why small farmers usually struggle financially, and fail often. Today, the goose still sucks the rivers dry, and it still eats people, but it doesn’t lay golden eggs anymore.

Eventually, life as a small farmer will rehabilitate a lot of black market growers. The people who played smart, paid their land off, love it, and know how to live close to it, will survive on honest labor and thrift. For the rest of Humboldt County’s 12,000+ black market cannabis growers out there, the people who moved here to grow weed, because they thought they could make money at it, it’s just a matter of time. You can tell haw smart they are by how quickly they scram. The smart ones have already left.

A lot of growers will move on to the next sleazy scam. Don’t be surprised if you see them in the health care industry, or working for Big Pharma, but only the smart ones will make that transition seamlessly. Most of Humboldt County growers will not respond well to the economic downturn. Generations of living the low-status, highly secretive, life of a black market drug dealer left us with limited skills, substance abuse problems and chronically low self-esteem, issues we could always cover up, when we had plenty of money. Without money, it’s gonna be a bitch.

A lot of people still don’t know what hit them. They will crumble along with the black market cannabis industry here in Humboldt County. Broken-down cars will continue to accumulate on broken-down homesteads, occupied by broken-down people who have no idea what else to do. We won’t see quite so many big shiny new trucks in town, or cocky young men driving them. Instead, we’ll see more hollow, addicted and despondent young men, hitchhiking and asking for help. We’ll all feel the pinch, but it will be worse for some parts of Humboldt County than it will be for others.

Arcata will be fine. They took steps to run black market growers out of their residential neighborhoods years ago. They also have the college and a strong arts community that will all help buffer and mitigate the impacts of economic upheaval. McKinleyville seems to have inherited most of Arcata’s old indoor grows, and problems, which they are likely to see more of. Eureka and Fortuna have enough economic diversity to withstand the shock, if people, especially in Eureka, could learn to be more humane to each other.

Life up in rural North East Humboldt has always been pretty hardscrabble, and will remain so, but here in Southern Humboldt, where the black market cannabis industry choked out most of our economic diversity decades ago, we will feel the impacts of this collapse most acutely. Despite Anna Hamilton’s warnings, we remain ill prepared for it. Here, instead of facing reality, and preparing for the inevitable, we put our energy into cultivating a mythology about ourselves as growers of superior cannabis, in a region narrowly suited to it. Unfortunately, that myth only fooled us.

The goose has become a liability. Our dream of becoming the Napa County of cannabis just got buried in bushels of bud from Bakersfield. Now, it’s about survival. It’s about recovery. It’s about reality. For the first time in a long time, we’ll have the financial poverty to match our cultural poverty. Ultimately, that’s a good thing. When you build culture, it attracts money, which brings prosperity. A fountain of money, on the other hand, divorced from culture, breeds dependence and weakens communities. It’s time we got back to building culture, here in Southern Humboldt, instead of just growing money.

Facts don’t make writing good, and facts don’t make a story true. Mostly, facts provide an excuse for bad writing, and distract us from the truth about our own lives. Media outlets like to hype the factuality of their news reports, as incentive for you to ingest their bland, decontextualized descriptions of the day’s most violent events, but facts, by themselves, mean nothing. Divorced from perspective, facts have no power.

We tend to overemphasize the importance of facts in our culture, in the same way we over-value material objects. In reality, facts don’t lead to the truth any more than buying a Bowflex machine leads to the perfect physique. Nothing prevented you from exercising your muscles before you bought the machine. The machine just offers you a specific way to do something that you obviously prefer to avoid. Similarly, nothing prevented you from thinking deeply about your existential condition before The News started feeding you “the facts you need to understand your world.” Watching the News feels like you are doing something edifying, but really, it takes up way too much space for something we’re just not that involved with.

Journalists meticulously strip perspective out of their stories, leaving nothing but impotent rubbish to take up all of the space between the ads. “Unbiased and impartial” really means “disinterested and uncaring.” That’s how corporate advertisers like it, and that’s how corporate domination becomes the predominant perspective of all media. Advertisers pay for the right to present their perspective in their own words, against a neutral background of disconnected, irrelevant and objectified facts. That’s why “fact based journalism” is so popular in modern media.

For some reason, we believe in this myth about facts. We believe that exposing them and broadcasting them to every corner of the world will somehow make things better. We say: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” but today we see how the worst kind of scum thrives in bright light, so long as nothing taller or stronger can take root. Scum thrives because The News scorches the Earth with irrelevant, disembodied facts.

The News fills your head with irrelevancies that distract, subvert and belittle your own thought process, while it consumes all of the space where you might actually talk to your peers. Watching The News is not how you become an informed citizen; watching The News is how you become a brainwashed drone, and that’s not what anyone really aspires to become.

Information can be inspiring, relevant and powerful, but rarely is it so. Mostly, especially today, information distracts us, saps our energy, and wastes our time. The News becomes addictive, not because it provides an essential nutrient to intellectual and civic life, but because it masks the angst, confusion and general unease of alienation. Facts, as they come from to us from the media, amount to little more than an endless trail of breadcrumbs leading us nowhere except toward obesity, malnutrition and death.

To find the very worst fact-based writing, however, you have to read science. Science, as a whole, amounts to an immense edifice of the worst published writing in the history of human language, which unscrupulous men use in their quest to dominate the Earth. In that way, modern science is very much like the medieval Catholic Church.

Few of us read much real science. Mostly, this indecipherable gobbledygook gets filed away in back rooms of libraries or in ungoogleable internet servers, where no one ever reads it, but it becomes part of this enormous edifice of sacred texts into which all learned people have invested large portions of their lives, with the promise that if they did, they would earn more money than the rest of us.

In reality, nothing in that edifice of so-called knowledge helps us, or them, understand the world we live in. Instead, it amounts to an encyclopedia of violence and a compendium of oppression. The edifice we call “Science” contains the formula for every toxic chemical on Earth. It tells you everything you need to know to build a thermonuclear weapon, and it contains every study ever conducted for the purpose of learning how to influence consumer behavior and effectively brainwash a population. The truth of the matter is that the only thing educated people really learn, in all their years of study, is the dynamics of civilized political power, and by the time they understand that, they’re already too deeply invested in it to quit.

Scientists further deny the basic truth of our lived experience by telling us that the only facts that matter, have to be carefully chosen according to complex statistical algorithms that only scientists understand, or they have to be gathered in a laboratory setting. Scientists will be the first to dismiss the facts of your life as irrelevant, anecdotal and statistically insignificant. They’ll tell you to base your decisions on the proven probabilities of verifiable science, and to calculate, rather than feel your way through life. That’s how scientists tell you that they think they should make your decisions for you, and that’s another way that modern science resembles the Catholic Church.

All of the facts in the world don’t make bad writing worth reading. Facts are just a sleazy tool to sell empty words, and too many empty words can bury you. On the other hand, writing that speaks to you, has truth in it, and you will find the facts that support it because there is more truth in the facts of your life, than you will ever find in all of the news media and science writing on Earth.

This past Tuesday, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors took up the topic of whether or not to declare a shelter crisis in Humboldt County. At least 20 people came, mostly from the HSU Homeless Students Alliance to ask the Supervisors to recognize the well established fact that Humboldt County does not have nearly enough housing to accommodate its residents and workforce, and that emergency measures should be taken to address this problem.

The HSA is just the latest group to ask the Board of Supervisors to make this declaration. Concerned citizens and organized groups like AHHA have been pressing the county about this for years. The Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, after listening to dozens of hours of public testimony on the subject, has recommended that the Board of Supervisors declare a shelter crisis multiple times. The Board of Supervisors has repeatedly ignored them all.

The Board of supervisors didn’t have any problem taking swift and decisive action to address homelessness, when they thought they could do it by passing radical, draconian, and unconstitutional laws designed to criminalize poverty. Clearly the problem was serious enough that they thought it warranted infringing on all of our constitutional rights, but, alas, this punitive approach failed miserably, yet again.

When this policy of unbridled police state fascism failed, the county jumped on the “Mormon Miracle” called “Housing First,” but even the Housing First consultants, who the taxpayers pay to advise our Board of Supervisors, have told them that there isn’t enough housing in Humboldt County to make Housing First very effective. In reality, all Housing First does in Humboldt County is take housing away from working families, and give it to disabled individuals. We need housing for working families, and for disabled people, and we need it all to be affordable.

We have well established organizations with plans and working models, all home-grown, designed to solve our housing problem here in Humboldt County by creating affordable housing that works for the people who need it. They have made dozens of presentations and attended hundreds of meetings about it. This past Tuesday’s BOS meeting was just the latest. What did the Board of Supervisors decide to do about this serious problem at Tuesday’s meeting? They decided to form an ad hoc committee, which allows them to waste everyone’s time and money for another couple of years without doing anything constructive.

If they could have solved this problem by punishing people, this problem would have been solved years ago. We love to punish people here in Humboldt County, and our Board of Supervisors will eagerly implement our most sadistic impulses and write them into law, but we really hate to do anything that makes life easier on people. Most of us are too small-minded to see beyond our own petty resentments, insecurities and greed, and too well programmed by corporate propaganda to think for ourselves. We don’t mind working two low-wage jobs, just to pay the rent, so long as the people who don’t work that hard, sleep out in the rain. We’re literally just that stupid.

Even without a significant racial divide, Humboldt County gives Mississippi a run for the money in the field of bitter small-minded hatefulness. Honestly, I have never heard hatred and bigotry expressed more openly and frequently, against anyone, anywhere, in all my life as I hear it here in Humboldt County, against the poor and homeless. It is, by far, the ugliest thing about Humboldt County, and all of the media outlets here pander to that ugliness and promote it. It’s shameful.

Unfortunately, the American Genocide, extractive industries, and the War on Drugs have brought out the worst in people here in Humboldt County, and attracted the worst kind of people to Humboldt County for longer that anyone can remember. It shows. It shows in ugly attitudes, bitter resentment, and heartless insensitivity to the suffering of others.

We’re not getting anywhere by reasoning with these people. For them, reason is just a tool for getting their own way. They’ll say anything. Lying is second nature to them, and lying to themselves is first. They’ll make sure that the new ad hoc committee on homelessness does nothing but waste time and money for another year or two, while dozens of people die needlessly on the streets of Humboldt County.

We should stop wasting our time with them. Instead, I think we need to take a more revolutionary approach to homelessness. Instead of appealing to the better nature of people who clearly have no better nature, we should focus directly on providing the needy with the tools they need to secure for themselves, a home, and a brighter future here in Humboldt County.

Instead of appealing to the rich and insensitive to come together as a community, we should arm the poor and oppressed to enable their liberation. For $200 we can put a quality firearm in the hands of a needy homeless man. For $1 we can put a bullet in that gun. With a gun and some bullets, we can give homeless people the tools they need to claim their rightful home here in Humboldt County, the same way early settlers did when they first discovered this beautiful place. That is, by killing, and enslaving the people who already live here.

A lot of our homeless Vets have military training. Providing them with guns and ammunition would give them the opportunity to put that training to use here in the US, and they could train other homeless people how to work together to launch successful tactical assaults. Together, they could overcome any obstacle and rise above their current economic condition, even without the support of Humboldt County’s “Old Guard” or new rich.

Every cop we hire here in Humboldt County costs the taxpayers more than $100,000 a year, and hiring more cops has completely failed to address the problem of homelessness in Humboldt County. The Kevlar vests and semi-automatic weapons our cops carry cost a pittance by comparison. We could save a lot of money, and solve the problem of homelessness once and for all, if instead of hiring cops, we just gave the guns, ammunition and armor to to the people in the street who need them to secure their little piece of Humboldt County and participate in this proud Humboldt County tradition.

Even if we can’t raise the money locally, I’ll bet we can find foreign governments who would be happy to help us out. I know this isn’t a new idea, but I don’t think it has ever been given a fighting chance to succeed in the US before. We could be pioneers here in Humboldt County, with this new approach to solving the problem of poverty and homelessness. They’ll call it the Humboldt Revolution, and it will change the way the world sees poverty in America. It’s got to start somewhere. Why not here?

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)